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May 3, 2011

Sony Announces Another Site Suspension

by Sam Savage

Sony Corp. said it has suspended its online PC gaming service due to the recent hack that affected as many as 77 million PlayStation users worldwide, reports BBC News.

The suspension of Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) comes after the shutdown of the PlayStation Network last month due to a breach that compromised users' personal data. Sony says it found the new issue while investigating the initial security breach.

A spokesman for Sony said the new issue is not due to a second attack.

SOE offers multiplayer gaming including DC Universe, Free Realms and the Facebook-based Fortune League. Those games and other SOE titles are not available as a result of the shutdown.

The SOE suspension was announced in a statement on its Station.com website.

"We have had to take the SOE service down temporarily," the statement said. "In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately. We will provide an update later today (Monday)."

Last week, Sony said it did not believe SOE users were affected by the PlayStation Network attack. But as the investigations continued, Sony officials found the SOE issue.

"We have been conducting a thorough investigation and, to the best of our knowledge, no customer personal information got out to any unauthorized person or persons," a community relations spokesperson wrote on one of Sony's support forums.

"We are continuing that investigation and monitoring the situation carefully; should the situation change, we will - of course - promptly notify you," the spokesperson said.

Sony promised it would get the PlayStation Network up-and-running again within the week. Users should see a phased reintroduction of gaming, movie and music download services, it said.